A Daily Blog (est. 10/2012) dedicated to quality writing, original content and a healthy dose of entertainment from "A Vagabond in God's Big Pond" Explore etymology with WORLD WIDE WORDS (Archived Link). PUNS FOR INTELLIGENT PEOPLE will tickle your fancy. The WAYBAC MACHINE will take you back in time. +++Plus +++ read my book ALPHA OMEGA M.D. coming in Spring of 2019. Read about The Space Family McKinney at your own pace in = THE RETURN TRIP and The NULL Solution, Episode Catalogs for both in the "links" section. as well as Constance Caraway ~ Forever Mastadon. We are in the midst of Alpha Omega M.D., concluding near the end of the year. — If you have not viewed this blog on a PC or Tablet, you don't know what you're missing.

Disney Theme Park

Attractions That

No Longer Exist

Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, and since then, the corporation has only grown its park locations all over the world. Over 20 million people visit each of these locations every single year. So, it only makes sense that in order to keep these Disney fans coming back, improvements need to be made to the park rides and attractions. Here are 10 attractions that simply did not make the cut.

10. Videopolis

When you think of Disneyland, you probably don’t think about nightclubs. During the 1980s, Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disneyland decided that he wanted attractions that would appeal to local teenagers. At the time, season passes were only $40 all year, or $35 during summer break, with a student ID. This meant that local teens could visit Disneyland every night of the year to dance to music videos and live bands. There was even a TV show on The Disney Channel showcasing Videopolis. They also hosted a televised event called Disneyland’s Summer Vacation Party, where Disney mascots danced in the audience with the teens while listening to the very ’80s bands, Oingo Boingo, ELO.

This teen dream came crashing down, when a 15-year-old died from getting shot in the parking lot of Disneyland in 1987. For years, Studio K at Knott’s Berry Farms in Anaheim, California hosted dances every night, and it was a go-to place for high school kids, since admission was free. Disneyland quickly became designated as the place for “rich kids” to go clubbing, since it cost $40 to get in. With inflation, that is closer to $92 today, which most parents could not afford. Local gangs decided to wait out in these parking lots, because it’s safe to guess that they were selling them something to help enhance their Disney experience, if you know what I mean. Disneyland quickly realized that this nightclub didn’t exactly align with their family values, and decided to end Videopolis in 1989. Today, the theater is used for family-friendly performances.

9. The Great Movie Ride

This ride was a collaboration between Disney and Turney Classic Movies at Disney World in Orlando, Florida that began in 2015, and expired in 2017. Guests sat in a car that was guided through sets that were made to look like classic movies like Singin’ in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Public Enemy, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. They were all complete with their own animatronic “actors” that play out famous scenes. Audience members sat in a moving car for 18 minutes.

While the ride was iconic, the movies that were included may have been unknown to young children who were visiting Disney World. Surely, Turner Classic Movies was hoping to entice people to tune in to watch these classics, but maybe they didn’t get the views they were hoping for. The attraction is being replaced with Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, which combines an animated film and real-life changing sets. It truly does look like it will be stunning, and it is officially scheduled to premiere in 2018.

8. The Peoplemover and the Rocket Rods

In the 1960s, Tomorrowland was a showcase of how Disney Imagineers saw the future. One ride that guests absolutely loved was called The Peoplemover. Slow-moving cars go along tracks that are built throughout all of Tomorrowland. The ride never stopped, and people got on and off so efficiently, that there were never a very long line.

When they revamped the look of the Tomorrowland park, they decided that the Peoplemover just wasn’t “cool” enough for their new style in Disney World Orlando. They kept the old tracks, and added a new ride called The Rocket Rods. Each rocket-shaped vehicle could only take a few people at a time. The ride sped up, and then slowed down at every turn. Wait times in line were nearly two hours long, and guests were very underwhelmed by the entire experience.

Not only was the concept a bust, but only a few weeks after opening the ride, it had to be shut down for three months of repairs. Even when it reopened again, the ride needed to be shut down for repairs at least once a day, and the concrete tracks supporting the ride were beginning to crumble. In the year 2000, the ride closed down completely, but the tracks are still there, gathering dust.

7. America Sings

In order to celebrate the upcoming Bicentennial 200-year anniversary of The United States, Disneyland opened the attraction America Sings in 1974. It was a musical show set on a rotating stage. Animatronic animals moved along with a recording of songs from American history. Once the song was done, the stage would move, and new animatronics would appear.

After only a few months of the attraction’s existence, a young woman named Deborah Gail Stone was working at Disneyland part-time as a hostess. She leaned back in her chair while the rotating stage was changing, and it crushed her head. Deborah’s family tried to sue Disneyland for their daughter’s death, but they lost the lawsuit, because leaning back in her chair was against safety procedure. The attraction continued for over 10 years, but since it was really meant to celebrate the Bicentennial, there was no need to keep the creepy robot party going for so long. It eventually shut down in 1988, and it was never reopened.

6. Superstar Limo

The ride Superstar Limo put park guests in the position of being the hottest new Hollywood star. A moving car begins at the Los Angeles Airport, and makes its way through famous locations, past some caricatures of famous movie stars like Whoopi Goldberg, Cher, and Tim Allen, and ends at The Chinese Theater. The artistic style looked more like scene out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? than a Disney park ride.

It opened at Disney’s California Adventure in 2001, and while some people enjoyed it, the majority of guests were confused. Some people were downright offended, specifically because the ride actually recommends getting tattoos, which is understandable troubling for some parents. In fact, Superstar Limo got such a negative reaction from local newspapers and park guests, that it was closed down after less than a year.

5. Maelstrom

The Maelstrom ride took guests on a viking ship, floating past characters from Norwegian folk tales and legends, including a three-headed troll, a sea dragon, and…polar bears? It ends with guests walking around an indoor replica of a Norwegian fishing village. There is a 5-minute long movie at the end called The Spirit of Norway, which gave an overview of what life in Norway was like.

It opened in 1988, and lasted until 2013, when Disney released the plans to rehabilitate it into Frozen Ever After. Considering that the locations in the movie Frozen were inspired by Norway, the boat and the surrounding theme did not need to be changed very much. The Fishing village became the town square of Arendelle. Guests still board a boat, only this time, they see animatronic characters from the Frozen movies. The technology used in both rides is relatively the same, but the guests are far happier with Frozen Ever After than they were with Maelstrom.

4. Body Wars

There was a section of Disney World’s Epcot called Wonders of Life pavilion that was built to educate people on the human body, and encourage health and fitness. It was completely sponsored by MetLife Insurance, who paid to have their company’s name plastered everywhere.The most popular attraction in The Wonder of Life was Body Wars.

Guests were “shrunk down” inside of a ship, which moved as they watched a film about a group of scientists exploring the inner workings of the human body. The film was directed by Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock in the original Star Trek series. So, it’s no wonder why it was successful. While there were plenty of other things to do at the Wonders of Life pavilion, Body Wars was by far one of the go-to attractions in Epcot in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

When Disney lost their partnership with MetLife, the attraction slowly began to lose more and more of its sections, due to the major budget cuts. Eventually, the Pavilion was converter for the annual Food and Wine Festival.

3. Submarine Voyage

In the 1950s, submarines were still a very new technology, and the public was fascinated by them. So, it only made sense when Walt Disney wanted to include Submarine Voyage in Tomorrowland. During the 1960s, they even hired local teenage girls to swim around as live mermaids. The mermaids were obviously the most popular part of the attraction. According to former park employees, people would throw money out to the mermaids as tips, and one time, a young man from the Navy jumped into the water so he could swim out to their tanning rock to hang out with the mermaid girls. Security eventually had to fish him out, of course.

The park eventually realized there were multiple safety issues with the mermaids, including the fact that many girls say they could feel themselves getting sucked into the propellers. They were no longer part of the experience in 1967. The ride lasted until 1998, when it was eventually shut down. In 2007, it was reimagined as the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage.

2. Alien Encounter

The “ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter” – or Alien Encounter for short – was an attraction in Walt Disney World park in Orlando, Florida. The storyline of the attraction surrounded an alien corporation called X-S Tech. The ride used air, lights, and surround sound in the seats to scare guests into believing that an alien monster had escaped inside of the room.

Adults and teenagers loved this ride, and it gained a true cult following of fans who revisited the ride every year. However, it made many parents angry, because they believed it was far too scary for kids. The ride ran from 1995 to 2003, until it was shut down, and reimagined as Stitch’s Great Escape.

1. Big Thunder Ranch

At Big Thunder Ranch, the most exciting thing you would find was… a cow. Yes, a cow. Its name was “Micky Moo”, because of the Micky-mouse shaped patches on its fur. The attraction was built in 1986 as a Western-style petting zoo and Barbecue restaurant. There was an old fashioned blacksmith demonstration, but beyond that, there wasn’t much to do at Big Thunder Ranch.

In 1998, the space was renovated into The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Festival of Fools. Strangely enough, they brought Big Thunder Ranch back in 2004, only this time, characters from the not-so-popular Disney movie Home on the Range was incorporated, so at least the second time around, it made a little more sense. However, it was closed down a second time in 2016 to make way for Star Wars Land. Which, we can all agree, is probably going to be a slightly more popular attraction.

Common Misconceptions

About Cowboys

They’re the guys with the thousand yard stare. The one with six-shooters in their holsters, a broad-brim hat on their heads and enough jagged iron in their guts to break down even the toughest steak. They are the cowboys, and everyone knows they’re the coolest, calmest, most-heroic folk in America history.

Or are they? What if we were to tell you that the cowboys you think you know are nothing like the real ones? That your mental image of cowboys could do with slightly less stoicism and gunfights… and more camels, examples of poor personal hygiene, and venereal diseases. Here are 10 little-known, crazy facts about the men who really tamed America’s wild west.

10. Most Cowboys Didn’t Carry Guns

The gun-totin’ cowboy is the only cowboy most of us can picture. He’s Clint Eastwood on the way to a shootout. John Wayne blowing away bad guys. Yet take your Blu-Ray player back to the 19th century and show a genuine cowboy these films and he’d likely look at you askance. Why? Because real cowboys only rarely carried weapons.

Sure, you might need them when you were out on a cattle drive or whatever. But when you got to town? Check that baby at the door. Most towns in the wild west enacted strict gun control, just to make sure the sort of shootouts we see in movies didn’t happen on a daily basis. Even the infamous Tombstone didn’t let its cowboys walk round armed. The Gunfight at the OK Carrol only came about because Doc and Earp were trying to enforce gun laws.

The city wasn’t alone. Dodge City, Wichita, and others all stopped their visitors from packing heat. So how did cowboys solve problems without their pistols? We’re glad you asked…

9. They Almost Never Got in Fights

It’s said that “the true story of the American West is one of cooperation, not conflict.” Although 90 percent of westerns involve people getting shot, a barroom brawl, a violent posse riding into town, or (more likely) all three, the truth of the frontier was that acting tough was a good way to wind up dead. If you wanted to survive, you basically had to get on with your neighbors.

This meant no high noon showdowns, no thuggery, and no murders. Even in the roughest, toughest cattle towns, the murder rate was generally lower than that of most modern American cities. Bank robberies, too, were rare. In 2005, the University of Dayton calculated that there were more bank robberies in modern Dayton in a single year than there were across the entire Old West in a typical decade.

There were exceptions, of course. In the immediate post-Civil War period violence sporadically flared up, and Native American tribes often experienced the brutal side of the frontier. But these were the exceptions. Even notorious outlaws were less violent than their reputation suggests. Billy the Kid, for example, spent way more time rustling cattle than he ever did robbing banks or shooting people.

8. Many Were Ravaged by Venereal Diseases

If your mental image of a cowboy is John Wayne acting all moral and clean-cut, you might not want to read this entry. The reality of cowboy life was dirty from beginning to end. Cowpokes often went days on end without bathing. They were smelly. Often covered in grime and stale sweat. But dirtiest of all was what was happening inside their bodies. Y’see, it’s now thought that many citizens of the frontier were crawling with venereal diseases.

Depending on where you were in the Old West, between 50 to 90 percent of the local prostitutes were likely carrying STDs. And since many cowboys liked to, ahem, avail themselves of these ladies’ talents, that meant a whole bunch of cowboys were riding around with a growing bacterial menagerie between their legs.

Although precise figures are hard to come by today, we know that new recruits to the US Army between 1876 and 1896 were frequently diseased, suggesting many of the general population were, too. Some have even suggested that crazy behavior by guys such as the Wild Bill Hickok might have been due to syphilis, making them act all eccentric.

7. Plenty Didn’t Do Any Riding Whatsoever

Close your eyes. Picture a cowboy. Got him? Right: What animal did he appear with?

Despite the name, almost none of you said ‘cow’. For a good reason. Cowboys in modern mythos are almost completely inseparable from their horses. The image of them riding across the high plains on a long cattle drive is one charged with romance and the spirit of adventure. For many cowboys, that was exactly what life was like.

But not for all of them. For a significant minority, their job description involved absolutely no riding whatsoever.

This was especially true at the end of the era, from about 1885 onwards. A dry summer and a terrible winter had convinced many ranchers to keep their cattle close to home. For a huge chunk of cowboys, that meant the romance of the plain was suddenly replaced with menial labor like mending fences and checking penned cows for disease. If they got to ride anything at all, it would likely be a haymow. Unsurprisingly, most hated such work.

6. Some That Did Ride Rode Camels

Here’s a classic western scene. The sun stands at high noon, baking the lifeless city streets. A tumbleweed blows through the dust. A shadow appears on the horizon. It’s the cowboy. He emerges out of the heat haze, skin like cracked leather… and proceeds to ride into town on the back of his Arabian camel. Wait, what?

It’s true. In certain parts of the Old West, horses were as rare as they are in big cities today. Instead, ranchers had their cowboys ride on the backs of camels that had been imported in the 1850s, and accidentally released into the wild at the height of the Civil War.

Because of the harsh conditions on the frontier, it had been theorized camels would cope much better than horses with the heat. The US Government agreed. At great cost it imported hundreds of camels to Camp Verde, only for war to break out. When the Confederates seized the camp they released the camels. For the next few decades, enterprising ranchers occasionally caught a few, broke them in and gave them to their cowboys to work with.

5. ‘Brokeback’ Encounters Were Surprisingly Common

Remember 2005? That was the year Brokeback Mountain hit cinemas and Heath Ledgerproved he didn’t have to be in clown makeup to provide a magnetic performance. The movie was also controversial among some who thought it was grafting our modern notions of sexuality onto a historic setting (in this case, the 1960s).

Interestingly, this is the one criticism that can easily be refuted. According to historian and author Patricia Nell Warren, gay encounters were way more common in the Old West than we ever realized.

A lot of this is thanks to the conditions cowboys had to endure. Long stretches of time away from women, surrounded by other men, led to occasional ‘one-off’ trysts simply as a way of relieving sexual tension. Within that mix, you had a handful of genuinely gay cowboys, who’d often fled out West as a way of achieving anonymity. Because manpower was scarce, it was impractical for landowners to refuse to hire them due to their sexuality.

As social historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman noted in their book Intimate Matters, there are even surviving love poems written from cowboys to one another. It might have been frowned upon by the rest of society, but on the Frontier, homosexuality was relatively open.

4. Black Cowboys Were Also Surprisingly Common

Quick: how many westerns can you name that feature black cowboys? Most of us can probably only get Django Unchained and Blazing Saddles. As a result, you might think African-American cowpokes were a rarity on the frontier. You’d be wrong. By some estimates, as many as one in four cowboys were black.

It makes sense when you think about it. Cowpunching, as it was often called, was a dirty, difficult, badly-paid, working class job. In the post-Civil War era, those were exactly the sort of jobs newly-emancipated slaves might be expected to do. And as we mentioned above, the Old West was one area where employers couldn’t afford to turn a good pair of hands away, no matter what the color of their skin was.

That’s not to say everything on the frontier was racial harmony. Way into the 20thcentury, black cowboys were expected to do the hardest, toughest jobs of all. They were the ones breaking in wild horses, doing all the cooking on wagon drives, and holding the cattle down at branding time. On the other hand, black cowboys often had a degree of autonomy and responsibility they would have lacked in other jobs. Perhaps that’s why so many ex-slaves chose to head out West.

3. Outlaws Were Shameless Self-Promoters

When you hear that robbers today are live-Tweeting their own break-ins, it’s tempting to assume we’ve hit rock bottom as a culture. Such nonsense would never have happened in the stoic Old West, right? Kinda. Although photographs of Pat Garrett playing on his smartphone have yet to surface, outlaws of the cowboy era were just as narcissistic as today’s criminals. When conducting major crimes, they frequently handed out press releases.

Jesse James was notorious for this. When holding up a train, he’d pass witnesses a carefully-written note, boasting about his own exploits. He wasn’t the only one. Billy the Kid deliberately inflated his kill-count from 8 to 21, and boasted about his violent temper. In fact, the Kid almost never got involved with shooting, robbing or hold ups. The main reason the law went after him was because he kept rustling cattle.

On the other side, the good guys were equally image-conscious. Wild Bill’s nickname actually referred to his gigantic nose, similar in size to a duck’s bill. It was only by effort he made out it referred to his ‘wild’ and dangerous nature, thereby terrifying local criminals.

2. The Rest of the Country Considered Them Suspicious and Dirty

The cowboy is enshrined in legend as the epitome of American values. While other eras and professions have their draws, it’s impossible to think of a historic figure today more beloved by the entire nation. Which just goes to show how times change. In the early days of the Frontier, cowpunchers were regarded as ill-educated vagrants at best, and dangerous carriers of disease at worst.

Around the Deep South, cowboys were considered trespassers who used public land for their own gain. The North generally considered them illiterate (they usually were). Even along the Great Plains, there was much resentment. Cattle drives routinely trampled the crops of farmers and Native Americans, and it was the cowpunchers themselves who got the blame. Many people even feared they would spread dreaded ‘Texas Fever’ throughout the land. It’s safe to say that, during the golden age of the cowboy, most of America regarded them as a smelly nuisance.

It wasn’t really until the early 20th century that pulp novelists and early Hollywood began to transform these tough, dirty, uneducated men into folk heroes. Fast forward to today and that’s the image that remains.

1. Modern Germans Love Them

Of all the countries in the world, which do you think has fallen for the cowboy myth the hardest (aside from the good ol’ US-of-A, that is)? Nope, it’s not Canada. Not Australia. Not even Great Britain. The country most obsessed with the cowboy today? Germany.

For some reason, Germans go nuts over cowboy-related stuff. Hundreds of clubs exist across this mountainous European nation, where people go on weekends to dress as cowboys and pretend they’re living in 19th century Texas. It’s estimated that several tens of thousands of Germans do this every single week, with many, many thousands more holding a passing interest in such exploits.

Nor is this a completely modern thing. Back in the 1930s, the Nazis venerated cowboys almost as much as they did genocide. Hitler himself was known to be a huge fan of westerns, often reading cowboy books between bouts of conquest and megalomania. For some reason, this very un-German tradition has taken deep root in a country far more ordered and rule-abiding than the Old West ever was. Which just goes to show, we guess, that you never can tell what the future has in store.

Pastimes That Will Actually

Make You Smarter

Human intelligence is a collection of skills, including knowledge, memory, quick-wittedness, analytical ability, and pattern recognition, just to name a few. These skills can be sharpened through practice and pushing yourself. In a lot of ways, the brain is like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. And you can exercise your brain in some ways you may not realize.

10. First Person Shooters

First person shooters often get a bad rap, mostly because of the level of violence associated with them. There is no denying that some of them are utterly, gratuitously violent, but there is also some proof that they may help make you smarter.

A study from 2015 showed that when people played 3D games, like first person shooters, they had increased development in their prefrontal cortex, right hippocampus, and cerebellum, all of which are used for complex human actions, like spatial memory, navigation, and hand-eye coordination. In another study, researchers had one group play a puzzle game and a second group played first person shooters. They found out that the group that played the first person shooters were more likely to avoid distraction better and had improved selective visual attention, meaning they better able at processing visual information than people not playing the puzzle games.

9. Moderate Drinking

A large study from 2010 conducted in Norway, which followed 5,033 men and women over the age of 54 for seven years, came to an interesting conclusion: it turns out that moderate drinking is linked with better brain activity. They found that women who drank four or more glasses of wine within two weeks had better brain functionality than women who had no drinks at all. They also found that wine was especially helpful, compared to other alcohols.

This type of study also correlates with prior studies that show that moderate drinking not only helps with cognitive functions, but it also helps combat dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Of course, it is important to point out that this is moderate drinking, and chronic heavy drinking has detrimental effects on the brain. So as long as you keep it moderate, feel free to have a bottle of wine every so often.

8. Sex

Sex has long been linked to a number of health benefits, including reducing stress, and it may aid in helping burn calories. But it also may be good for your brain.

The findings of the first study is one of those good news/bad news type of deals, depending on your feelings towards commitment and monogamy. Findings from an Italian study suggests that sex does make us smarter, but only when you have sex with a new partner. Researchers found that nerve growth was significantly higher in couples that just started dating and were in love, versus people in long term relationships.

But there is good news for people who are in a long term relationship. Two other studies using rats and mice concluded that sex helped mental performance and increased neurogenesis, which is the production of new neurons in the hippocampus, an important part of the brain where long-term memories are formed.

So, as if you needed another reason to have sex besides it being, you know, sex, it could actually make you smarter and improve your long term memory. And if you’re having enough sex to consider it a hobby, well, good for you.

7. Scrabble

Scrabble was invented in 1938 by Alfred Mosher Butts, an unemployed architect living in Jackson Heights, New York, whose last name is pretty hilarious. Butts, you guys. Scrabble is difficult to master, because someone needs a large vocabulary and pattern recognition in order to do well in the game. After all, where you place your tiles is just as, if not more, important than the word you spell. Since the game is challenging, it has the ability to help increase the brain power of people who play it.

Researchers at the University of Calgary found that visual word recognition, which is the ability to recognize a word nearly effortlessly and is a skill that is thought to be developed between childhood and adulthood, is actually flexible in adulthood and can be improved with practice. One way to do that is to play Scrabble. During the study, the researchers noted that competitive Scrabble players were faster to pick out real words versus nonsense words and, perhaps not unsurprisingly, they were also able to recognize words when they were written vertically. This indicates that, with practice, even into adulthood you can still grow your vocabulary and maybe, one day, you’ll be able to understand what the hell is going on in Infinite Jest.

6. Reading Fiction

It is understandable that reading non-fiction would make you smarter because it increases your knowledge about real events, places, and people. But does fiction have any benefits? Well, it turns out that people aren’t innately built to read, at least not in the same way we’re naturally wired to understand something like oral language. Instead, everyone who reads has to create “reading circuits” in the brain. These circuits can be weak or strong, it all depends on how much exercise the circuits get.

Two studies from York University in Toronto, Ontario, found people who often read fiction have better empathy skills, understand other people better, and are better able to look at a worldview other than their own. The reason is because when someone “deep reads,” meaning really sitting down and reading something as opposed to scanning or superficial reading, the same part of their brains are active as if it were happening in real life; meaning that reading quality fiction is one of the best ways to improve your emotional IQ.

5. Playing Tetris

Tetris, the world’s most popular video game, known for its addictive gameplay, was first programmed in 1984 in the USSR; not exactly a place known for its fun and games. Nevertheless, once the game started to gain popularity, the Soviets set up a company and sold the rights to the game to Nintendo in 1987. When Gameboy was released, Tetris was the debut game. Since then, 180 million copies of the game had been sold.

A study from 2009 found that when someone starts playing Tetris, the brain consumes a bunch of glucose, which is a fuel for the brain. But after practicing Tetris over a short time,the brain used less and less glucose each time they played. The reason is because the glucose thickens due to gray matter neurons becoming more interconnected, making it easier to solve problems. People who played Tetris for 30 minutes every day saw improvement in their overall brain function.

So the next time you get caught playing a game of Tetris at work or school, you can now say (preferably in a condescending tone that implies the person of authority is an idiot) you’re trying to improve your mind power to be more a productive worker/student, and go back to playing the game.

4. Playing Chess

Chess seems like the epitome of what smart people do. Whenever you see a smart characterin a movie or a show, they are seen playing chess, or at the very least they talk about or allude to chess. While it is a bit cliché, there is a lot of truth behind it because chess utilizes a lot of mental skills like visualization, planning, adapting, and the ability to read your opponent. Well, one reason that people who play chess are smart is because playing chessactually does make you smarter.

Studies performed on Chinese chess masters found that their brains had better network connectivity, which improves their learning and memorization skills. Even at a resting level, the chess masters’ brains were working more than novices. Besides just helping with memory and learning, chess also helps people with problem solving skills and understanding cause and effect. Like many other hobbies on this list, this can also help amateurs if they simply dedicate themselves to routine practice.

3. Exercising and Playing Sports

Everyone is probably familiar with the stereotype that jocks and athletes are dumb. But, it turns out that may not be true because it has long been well known that exercise leads to greater brain acuity, which is mental sharpness, and team sports contribute to intelligence and good brain health.

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School discovered that endurance exercises activates a molecule called irisin, which is responsible for activating genes involved with learning and memory. Exercising also fires up the hippocampus, which is involved in the storage of long-term memory; this includes all our knowledge and experiences. The hippocampus also has a major role in declarative memory, which is used to recall things like facts or events.

Besides exercising, there are also some mental benefits to playing team sports as well. Studies have found that athletes who play team sports have an increased cortical thickness in areas of the brain that track movement. Athletes were also shown to have better working memories, are more creative, and are better at multi-tasking. The good news is that this isn’t just true for athletes. With a bit of practice, non-athletes show increases in their brain power as well.

2. Dancing

A study from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City had a group of senior citizens, who were 75 and over, perform an assortment of different mental and physical activities to see how it would impact their mental acuity. Some of the activities included crossword puzzles, playing cards, playing tennis, golfing, swimming, and dancing. Out of all those, they found that dancing was one of the best things you could do to improve cognitive functions. They also concluded that this is effective for people of all ages, and it just doesn’t benefit the elderly. Besides strengthening their mental acuity, another interesting side effect that the researchers found was out of all the physical activities, only dancing helped prevent dementia.

Researchers believe dancing helps with acuity because dancing, unlike the other physical activity, uses spatial awareness and pattern recognition. This causes neural pathways in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus to connect, making the brain stronger.

1. Playing a Musical Instrument

And you can’t have dancing without music, right? Generally, when we’re doing a mental task, like reading or doing math problems, specific parts of our brain light up, but when we listen to music, it’s as if there are fireworks going off because our brain lights up in multiple areas. That is because when we hear music, different parts of the brain interpret different aspects of the music, like melody and rhythm, and then it is blended into what we register as music. Amazingly, music’s effect on the brain is even more pronounced when someone plays an instrument.

According to the above video from Ted-Ed, playing an instrument is like giving your brain a full body workout. There are a number of mental processes going on at once, meaning that many brain segments, all over the brain, are being used at once. Music utilizes many parts of the brain, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortexes. Finally, learning to play an instrument is based on disciplined and structured practices and that type of routine is ideal for improving brain strength.